Games today are complicated. Hyper-realistic graphics on ultra-modern rendering engines often requiring the computing power of a small moon just to enjoy the latest “Triple A” game. But one of the world’s best selling games of all time eschews all that in favour of simplicity and a self-directed sandbox game experience: Minecraft. This blocky sandbox game, created by Notch (aka Markus Persson), has totally blown up from its indie beginnings to become a pop-culture icon. And I’m kind of obsessed.

The game itself is conceptually very simple. The player appears in a procedurally generated world made up of blocks about 1 cubic metre. At first blush, the goal of the player is to manipulate the blocks in the world to gain the resources necessary to travel to the Nether dimension, then the aptly-named End dimension and ultimately defeat the Ender Dragon triggering the games end-credit sequence. Speed runners can do this in under 2 minutes. But for the majority of players working your way up to defeating the Ender dragon is kind of like getting through the preliminary rounds. Once you reach the end-game stage, then there’s nothing to do but be creative and build the world of your dreams.

The magic in Minecraft comes from a few specific features. The first is the relatively basic requirements in terms of system performance. The “original” version of Minecraft, commonly known as the Java edition, carries minimum Hardware requirements of an Intel i3 from 2013, and 4GB of RAM. The game may not be able to be modded or expanded much with that setup, but it remains playable even if your computer is 11 years old.

In addition to this, the procedural generation I mentioned before drives everything in the game from the terrain generation in all three dimensions, to the location of structures and the content of loot chests. And the generation is all based off the world seed, a numeric representation of a Minecraft world’s DNA. And it’s deterministic, meaning that every time you use the same seed (in the same version of the game) you’ll generate the exact same world. This allows for you and a friend to build in your own copies of the same world, or to replicate things you see from your favourite streamer or youtuber on your own world.

The last thing that I think makes this such an interesting and timeless proposition is that you can pretty much build anything you want, and you can let your creativity run wild and free. For those of us who don’t consider ourselves to be traditionally artistically inclined it’s a great way to be able to stretch some of those muscles in an environment that comes with some inherent (and for me very convenient) limitations.

There’s no wrong way to play Minecraft. Minecraft lets you play in a bunch of different ways, so you can tailor it to how you like to game. You can go solo and explore and build on your own, or you can jump on a multiplayer server and hang out with other players. These servers can be like whole new worlds, with tons of people working together on giant projects like the Minecraft recreation of Middle Earth. Yes, really.

Beyond the purely artistic and creative parts of Minecraft is a huge technical community. And really this probably deserves a whole separate blog post because it’s utterly fascinating. Players use the technical aspects of the game to make all sorts of contraptions both useful and bizarre which do things all by themselves. The built-in technology of Minecraft is called redstone. This is a material that allows you to build all sorts of different technological components. It acts as a way of transmitting power allowing you to detect and act on blocks and entities within your world. In addition to redstone players take advantage of all sorts of different intended (and unintended) game mechanics to make their creations come to life.

I never got into Minecraft in its early days. I’m part of a much more recent wave of Minecraft players that picked it up in the late 2010s after a sequence of major game updates brought a wide array of new features to the game, squashed some of the longstanding bugs, and added discoverability features that made the game a bit more obvious for new players. One of the few knocks on the game is that unless you know what Minecraft really is, it’s not super obvious where to start and why you might want to play it.

I got bit by the bug very quickly. Minecraft allowed me to build things that I’d always wanted to be able to make as far back as my early childhood playing in sandboxes, or making all kinds of things out of Lego. But Minecraft allowed be to bypass the limits of my own ability, or the limits of those physical objects in the world. I could just build whatever I wanted. The first world I ever played in, when I was learning about the game, was one with my brother and my kid. I made a simple little house on a hill… and excavated a large series of tunnels and rooms beneath it housing all sorts of different rooms. Totally invisible from the outside unless you knew where to look.

Minecraft has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a one-man project. It’s become a cultural phenomenon, a place where people can explore, create, and connect with others. The pixelated world of Minecraft isn’t just a game; it’s a reminder that sometimes the coolest things come from simple beginnings.

So grab your pickaxe, fire up Minecraft, and start exploring! Who knows what you’ll find? Reach out and let’s play. 🙂